Communications systems are rapidly expanding in order to increase the amount of information that may be transported through those systems. These communications systems often include different types of networking equipment, such as optical networking equipment. An Optical network, such as a Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), often includes multiple network elements arranged in a ring. Each network element typically communicates directly with two other network elements in the ring, one network element in each direction of the ring. When one network element needs to communicate information to another network element, the first network element communicates the information to the second network element through any intermediate network elements in the ring.
In a network such as an optical network, network addresses are statically provisioned at each network element when the network element is brought into service. Such provisioning is performed manually by network administrators as part of the turn-up procedure. After manually assigning the IP addresses, the network administrators then administer and track the addresses assigned to the various network elements in the network using spreadsheets and other tools. The performance of these tasks is labor dependent and, thus, prone to error.
In other network configurations, network addresses may be provisioned by a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server. However, DHCP servers are generally incompatible with optical networks since each network element must be able to connect directly to the DHCP server. Because most transport equipment will not support a direct connection to a DHCP server, it is not practical to use a DHCP server for the assignment of IP addresses to network elements in a transport network.